Working class heroine

Gauguin's grandmother was a pre-Marxist pioneer of unions and women's rights. Why, asks Deirdre Fernand, has she been airbrushed from history?

As marriages go, it was just another unhappy union. He gambled, she fretted. He drank, she complained, and then he began to beat her. He left her penniless, with three mouths to feed. He also left her with a bullet in her chest.

Flora Tristan, one of the founders of modern feminism, survived the shooting and went on to be counted among the most important political figures in her native France - and to become grandmother to the artist Paul Gauguin. The celebrated female novelist George Sand sought her out, Friedrich Engels read her books and attended meetings where her work was discussed, and Karl Marx defended her shockingly modern ideas in the press. On the day of her funeral, in November 1844, delegations of workers followed her cortege and later erected a monument over her grave in Chartreuse cemetery, Bordeaux. Today her books, letters and portrait are housed in France's